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Omnibus / Film

A little something for everyone, from my browser tabs to yours.

• Check out this beautiful slideshow of the Fox Theatre in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. Let's hear it for stimulus money (and many other sources) funding its restoration as the future home of the very vital Nickelodeon Theatre.
• Swinging through the Southeast, "Do you have a good eye for film? Do you love movies? Would you like to be involved in determining which films screen at the 2011 Atlanta Film Festival?" You have one more day to apply to be a screener for the 2011 ATLFF.
• Ricocheting to the great white north, Montreal-based Maisonneuve's "The Eh-List" details "Canuxploitation cinema: our homegrown industry of B-movies that run the gamut from camp to crap to pretty great. For every Sweet Hereafter, Red Violin and Atanarjuat, there are a hundred flicks like Screwball Academy, Cannibal Rollerbabes and Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare."

• Looking back into the past, FOC Nancy posted the following anecdote after Eddie Fisher died:
  

Eddie Fisher once appeared on a television program during which entertainers sought romantic, spiritual, and other miscellaneous guidance from a group of panelists (among them the noted wit George S. Kaufman). Fisher's complaint concerned a certain chorus girl who refused to go out with him on account of his age. "Mr. Fisher," Kaufman advised, "on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope - an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope." Here Kaufman paused, surveying the puzzled faces around him. "Mr. Fisher," he continued, "if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn't be able to detect my interest in your problem."

• From chorus girls to... computer programmers? I want to see this doc, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII. "Rosie made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was invented to aid the Army’s ballistic calculation efforts, six... women were tapped to become its first programmers."
• New York's Vulture talks rom-coms and watches You've Got Mail with the charming Mindy Kaling [who I still think of as that "Matt and Ben" actress because I am an Old who doesn't watch television]:

I was very intimidated by New York and I didn’t know it very well, and this movie really helped me, it made me fall in love with the city — it’s such a love letter to New York. I went to all the places in the film. And I decided that I love the Upper West Side. I remember watching it during Christmas and thinking, I wonder if I’ll ever have a really cute boyfriend like Tom Hanks, and sing carols around a piano? I love this line, where they say Parker Posey’s character makes coffee nervous. There are great jokes in here. Do you notice how they made everyone look so middle class and regular? And yet Ryan’s apartment is huge …

• That Henry Jenkins two-part interviews FOC Generoso Fierro, who, when he's not producing docs or spinning ska, has the very cool job of documenting the design process at MIT's GAMBIT games lab. One of this summer's prototypes, Elude, sounds especially fascinating, and I'm no gamer: "By tapping into the experiential aspects of the video game medium, Elude's metaphorical model for depression serves to bring awareness to the realities of depression by creating empathy with those who live with depression every day." Seriously, it's like demonlover and a plot point from an as-yet unwritten William Gibson novel had a baby!
• Finally, there's the fourth HiLobrow merit badge, Feral Tendencies! How one earns this little number reads like a lesson plan from Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School, so it should come as no surprise that under Requirements (complete 1 or more), one finds "4. Explain the significance of the dancing chicken in Werner Herzog’s Stroszek," while one option for Thought Experiments (complete 2 or more) is "8. Briefly explain the identities of Kaspar Hauser, Bruno S, and Timothy Treadwell. Were any of them feral? Explain."

Color me a-muse-d

Just a quick note to draw your attention to recent pieces by pals for which I am in some way to blame.

First up, clever Vadim expanded upon a conversation we started in the comments chez Pullquote [I felt just like Girish!] about accents, regionalism, and the importance of local critics for a post [and points for its title] over at Green Cine:

How to watch movies and judge their regional authenticity? On a certain level it doesn't matter: it's a peripheral rather than a core part of the experience, and a nice bonus for locals, but not much more.

<snip>

It's certainly irritating if directors get your city wrong, more so when viewers of those films refuse to believe the movie is wrong.

Read the whole thing here. The Guardian's Danny Leigh did, which led him to examine what happens when the setting is as much a star as the cast from an across-the-pond perspective:

Now, sheltered limey that I am, it's not for me to say whether or not the town of The Town – in fact, the traditionally Irish-American neighbourhood of Charlestown – is authentic or not. But while newcomers have revelled in its geographical realism, critics in the city itself have been more suspicious.

<snip>

So does it matter if it's real or not? I know people whose stock response on this question is that no fictional film ever has to get the little things right – and no, I'm not suggesting anyone cares whether Marmaduke presents us with a verité account of life for a freakishly large dog in California. But when a movie knowingly trades on the specific tang of its locale, it does imply a certain honesty and accuracy.

Which is why it's unsettling to hear that with The Town you might actually only be seeing what Burr calls "Movie Boston", just as Goodfellas might be Movie New York, or Chungking Express Movie Hong Kong. To do so is to sense you've been treated as a dopey tourist...

Hey, at least no one's expecting you to speak Navajo! Which brings me to piece number three. The cinetrix makes a smart-assed comment one morning, and later that same day finds herself paraphrased [and characterized] as the lede to Glenn Kenny's take on Film Socialisme.

"Enjoy the the Navajo and the anti-semitism!" an impish friend commented on Facebook at my mention that I was seeing the new Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme, this morning. Well, as one might have predicted, I enjoyed one but not the other. Let's deal with the "Navajo" first. For the English-language distribution versions of this film, Godard has put on the film subtitles that he's referred to as "Navajo" English. Instead of providing whole literal translations of entire patches of dialogue—and the dialogue is, in descending order of prevalence, in French, German, Russian, and English and maybe one or two other tongues I'm not remembering, and the soundtrack is layered in such a way that will not be unfamiliar to lovers of Nouvelle Vague and King Lear, which means in effect a very deliberate effect of artfully contrived Babel—he'll put up a series of key words, mostly nouns, sometimes invented compound words such as "nocrime" followed by "noblood" with, as seen here, nocaps. It doesn't take very long for the effect to stop feeling like subtitles at all and to play like a sort of running discrete text of its own, one made up in large part of what could be Twitter hashtags.

Hmmm. Maybe the next time I check in here I'll write something of my own, rather than be the wise-cracking Helen launching everyone else's ships. Meanwhile, gotta go teach and grade now. Ciao.

Null set

For the past few weeks now, the cinetrix, along with everyone else on the interwebs it seems, has been revisiting William Gibson. I prepared for his latest by rereading Pattern Recognition [around September 11th, as it happens, which I don't recommend] and Spook Country. Then last week I had a shitty, shitty stretch and treated myself to the [20% off!] hardcover edition of Zero History at the otherwise useless campus bookstore. Come to think of it, I have all three in hardcover, immediate gratification wrapped in the permanence of old media trumping thrift. It happens, and I'm a firm believer that all art that truly moves you, be it book, film, music, graffiti, finds you at just the right time. In fact, my first two posts on Pullquote back in 2003 sprang fullblown from a head that was still partway in Cayce Pollard's world.

Anyway, from the multitudes, I wanted to single out two recent Gibson interviews by FOCs Hugo Perez and Maximus Clarke. There's a bit of echolalic repetition that's par for the course for anyone doing press [who isn't a sociopath], sure, but also some gems unique to each. For example, the animation above, which details Gibson's answer to Hugo's question about his first memory of an encounter with technology or science.

Elsewhere, Perez observes

...There is great attention to detail in the way the characters find out that jeans are going to be on sale, they go to the location, they wait… as if on a pilgrimage. There’s something that seems almost religious or spiritual in your description of these moments, something about the spirit of the work that goes into making something real. Something about being able to touch real things that people made with their hands.

Gibson concurs

...[S]tanding in line and getting the real thing that isn’t ever going to be advertised. In some sense it’s a defiance of the system – that those artifacts even exist. People do it out of some stubbornness that I find admirable.

Now I recognize these phoners are frequently stacked like jets in New York airspace, but I wish Perez, himself originally from somewhere where thrift and ingenuity and reuse yield miraculous innovation, had more time to explore an aspect of the author's bio that he brings up in his introduction, "William Gibson grew up in an Appalachia of the 1950s that was so behind the times it seems like the 1930s when he looks back on it. In the 1970s, he made a living for a while scouring thrift stores for items he could resell at a profit to specialist dealers. He wrote his first novel on a 1930s Hermes portable typewriter." 

Fortunately, Max is on the case:

You’ve written previously about your fascination with thrift stores and eBay. What draws your attention to a particular item, and what makes you think, “This has got to be in a story”?

WG: Well, it isn’t as though I wander through the flea market, spot something, and think, “Wow, that’s got to be in a story one day.” It’s that I have a kind of vast and half-forgotten library of objects — artifacts, really, because the things that I describe are always man-made. And one of them will be summoned from the library through some unconscious or poetic process when the narrative requires it. I know that sounds precious, but I can’t think of a less precious-sounding way to put it. 

<snip>

...Europeans have lived forever happily among their own ruins. The very concept of retro-fitting strikes Europeans as weirdly redundant, because their world is in large part a retro-fit, and they expect what they’re building now to be retro-fitted. In North America, we’ve only recently come to that. Our cultural idea of the future has been something totally brand new, with no dirt in the corners.

Later on, Max mentions the character Milgrim, who is hounded through Zero History by a certain leitmotif that [those who know me shouldn't be surprised] brings me great pleasure.

What does this have to do with the seventh art? Past the lovely animation and the book's trailer, not a whole hell of a lot, I grant you. But hey, John Perry Barlow tweeted just today: "@JPBarlow "Zero History," @GreatDismal's languid and infinitely detailed prediction of the present, would make a wonderful film." So, um, there's that, I guess.

Meta

Somehow I find myself on a film criticism microrant of late. Eh, it happens. But I did want to laud Dana Stevens [herself once Liz Penn] for taking full advantage of the web-biness of her gig as Slate's film critic to review Catfish, the insert-your-own-mitigating-prefix "documentary" [forgive the scare quotes, I've been teaching the children Lowell], which, astonishingly, was one of the movies trailer-ed before The American [along w. Devil] in my distinctly not major-metropolis multiplex*. Having only heard about this flick from Sundance coverage, I was more than a little taken aback to have it touted in the buckle of the mainstream belt, as I attempted to explain to the 'Fesser in whispers designed not to disturb the other six civilians in our theatre.

*Cheek by jowl [if you'll pardon the carnality of the image] with supermarkets where catfish is cheap and easy to find, as it is "poor people's food" like a picnic shoulder might be in markets catering to Latin shoppers in the northeast.

THIS is why film critics still matter

Forget your Paul Brunicks [who he?] opining in Film Comment. Ty Burr's review of The Town puts paid to any discussion of whether local film critics still matter, and why the Globe, hobbled as it is thanks to owner NYT's debt to Carlos Slim, should be lauded for keeping TWO full-time film critics on staff. Enjoy Ty [with Wesley Morris, who was off singing karaoke Beyonce at TIFF, I hear] above, but then direct yourself to the extensive excerpts from Burr's review below that demonstrate writing to and for your readership. Gather 'round, children:

I don’t care what anyone outside the greater metropolitan area says: “The Town’’ takes place in Movie Boston rather than the real thing. Movie Boston is a sub-Scorsese landscape of stubbled men walking down mean Suffolk County streets that exist primarily in the minds of good pulp novelists and bad screenwriters, and its authenticity depends far too much on Hollywood actors trying hahd to bend their dialogue around non-rhotic speech patterns.

<snip>

Is “The Town’’ authentic? Hell if I know — I’m from Brookline. For that matter, the director’s from Cambridge, and the curse of this city’s clannishness (one of them, anyway) is that you can never speak to the reality of the next town over without somebody getting their panties in a twist. That’s partly the point of both Chuck Hogan’s original novel (“Prince of Thieves’’) and this adaptation: A community that takes so much pride in insularity will eventually choke on it. But Affleck’s more interested in townie mythologizing and borrowed Lehane-ian street cred; did I mention he’s from Cambridge?

<snip>

The knowingly chosen locations lead up to an amusing performance by Fenway Park as itself, and the grand absurdity of a high-speed police chase through the narrow streets of the North End has been thought out with devilish care. For once the geography in a Boston movie makes sense; even the standard shot of the Zakim Bridge has relevance.

The American

How to make an iced Americano:

Make one 1 1/2 oz. shot of Taste of Cherry.

Fill 10-oz glass with Antonioni.

Pour Taste of Cherry over Antonioni.

Fill glass with Melville and stir mixture to equalize temperature.

Sweeten to taste or serve with milk.

Sang-froid

If you've ever wondered what a time-traveling Gallic Andrew Blake would do with the Teorema script as rewritten by Radley Metzger, might I suggest Les Biches? Style for miles, and o so glacial. R.I.P., M. Chabrol.

Remember the mise-iest

At first glance, the three films I managed to catch at the Brattle Theatre during my two-week hound-sitting stint in late August could not seem more different: a Saturday afternoon showing of Pee-wee's Big Adventure [25th anniversary! I know you are, but what am I?]; a midweek matinee of In the Mood for Love as one-half of a most of the best of the Oughts [I missed Lost in Translation to catch -- ah, but there's a story for another day]; and, on my last day in town, the restored Metropolis. Squeee!

The variety, of course, speaks to the ongoing vitality of the Brattle's rep programming. Then there's the through line, which occurred to me only much later: jaw-droppingly deployed mise-en-scène from Mssrs. Burton, Wong, and Lang, respectively.

Burton, in his feature debut, got more than a little assist from Paul Reubens' fully realized man-child character, sure. But he managed to retain the dark, adult seaminess of the original Groundlings stage show in the midst of a candy-hued fantasia, an uneasy balance that would characterize much of his subsequent work [when it didn't topple outright]. Of course, when it comes to this movie I have no objectivity, only delight. It is one I know by heart. And it warmed my heart when two folks wormed into my balcony row after the lights had gone down -- and proceeded to quietly mouth most of the dialogue to each other with a whispery glee. After the credits rolled, I learned from the very self-possessed 9? 10? 11-year-old girl that it was her uncle's favorite, and she'd watched it plenty, too. It made me impatient for my nephew and nieces to get old enough to warp so wonderfully.

The strange thing about In the Mood for Love is that I was certain I'd seen it. So I went this time mostly because, you know, big screen, expert projection, cheong-sams for miles. But it turns out somehow I hadn't. Or, at least, not properly. The fades to black at the ends of episodes, the chaos of the apartment house, the play-acting betrayals, the indirection of the mise-en-scène were all a revelation to me. At one point the mahjong-mad neighbor observes of Maggie Chung's Mrs. Chan, "She dresses up like that to go out for noodles?" But, of course, she is always clad in exquisite sorrow -- the variegated cheong-sams are only a means for her, and us, to mark the passing of time. That era has passed, yes, but even as the narrative leaves Hong Kong and skips ahead in time and place [Singapore 1963, Cambodia 1966] it corresponds almost exactly to the period David Weiner et al. have been plumbing on Mad Men. Office work. The infidelity of bosses and spouses.

What a shame Nixon didn't get to China until 1972.

The cinetrix ain't even gonna front. I had never seen Metropolis before last month. Clips from that Giorgio Moroder thang don't count, and I say that as a long-time Donna Summer fan. Nor does that porno we used to rent out when I worked at the video store that swiped footage whole cloth, the name of which now escapes me. [Dirty birds, help me out. It was released circa Zazel and may have had an extended -- nyuk, nyuk -- Peter North scene toward the end.] I do cop to staying late at the office this past February to thrill at the folks huddled in the platz outside the Friedrichstadtpalast at which the restored version made its debut with live orchestra accompaniment, watching it projected on a building wall. Freezing! For the cinema! Oh, to live in such a world!

You don't need me to tell you how gorgeous and engrossing this film is. I mean, duh. But now I can pretend I was just waiting for the lost footage to be uncovered in Buenos Aires, right? And to see it on the storied screen of the Brattle. More than anything, in watching Metropolis I was able to remember that it is kind of wonderful to come at a thing backwards, if that makes any sense. Ordinarily, I see this phenomenon more in my students, when they realize that Casablanca, say, is the fons et origo of so many bits of familiar dialogue that circulate untethered in the popular culture they inhabit.

And now, a month on, I still savor the deep dread I felt when Rotwang tells the captive Maria, "Come. It is time to give the machine man your face!" And once he turns her into Hel's belle and turns her out to wreak havoc? Man. Evil Maria is the best. Brigitte Helm is so wonderfully feral for all of her being a machine. Love. her.

[Plus, as the last scribbled note of the few I could tear my eyes/attention away from the images long enough to write says, "Evil Maria looks like Vera Farmiga." Or, you know, vice-y verse-y.]

Our long national nightmare is over?

Manohla's back in the pages of the NYT at long last!

And her predecessor Elvis Mitchell, long a Pullquote favorite, will grace the little screen as part of the revamped return to public television of At the Movies. Thank you, Roger Ebert.

That said, not everything Ebs is up to can I get behind. For example, I stopped following him on Twitter once the anti-ebook-reader hectoring got to be too much to bear. [I love books! I'm an academic who lives with an academic! Stop yelling at me! I am on your side! I get it!]

So that means I won't be able appreciate the full experience of this tin-eared and slightly dithery event, coming to us "live" from TIFF later this afternoon:

Roger Ebert’s Twitter Showdown

Saturday, September 11th – 4:00 pm

Out-tweet, Outplay, Outlast!

Renowned film critic Roger Ebert tweets and fellow industry professionals tweet back!

This innovative panel brings together some hard-core tweeters as they face-off against one another by responding to Roger’s (sometimes contentious) statements about the film industry – in 140 characters. The audience will vote on who had the best tweet per round, taking into account wit, originality and even spelling!

Panelists:
Roger Ebert – Author and Film Critic, Chicago Sun-Times

with
Rainn Wilson – Actor (Super, Peep World, The Office)
David Poland – Critic, Movie City News
James Gunn - Director (Super)
Eric Kohn – Critic, indieWIRE, Screenrush
Grace Wang – Far-Flung Correspondent, RogerEbert.com
Scott Tobias – Critic, The Onion, The AV Club
Hosted by: Dan Levy – Co-Host, MTV Canada

Oh well. Guess I'll just have to come up with another way to observe the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Golden eighties

An outbreak of apophenia! The cinetrix has ended up reading a lot about 1980s film stuff this past week. To whit:

At the AV Club, Mike D'Angelo considers The Purple Rose of Cairo [a long-time personal favorite about which I wrote in an M.A. thesis in another life] and gets at what makes it tick.

...[T]he scene in which Tom Baxter—poet, adventurer, explorer, of the Chicago Baxters—can’t help but abandon his narrative for the sake of one sad, lonely woman in the audience remains one of the most electrifying moments in cinema, precisely and paradoxically because it encapsulates the one thing cinema can’t actually do, however fervently we wish it could.

<snip>

...[T]hat first instant when Tom breaks character and looks down at Cecilia (in a near-perfect duplication of a shot we’ve seen previously) never fails to wallop me. Part of it, I think, is just the eyeline, believe it or not. Movie characters have been breaking the fourth wall practically since the medium was invented, but when they do, they almost always look directly into the camera lens, at everybody watching. Allen, on the other hand, makes a point of showing us where Cecilia is sitting, and he shoots the key moment from well back in the theater, with her and other patrons visible in the foreground. Tom does not look at the camera. He looks at her. (I actually wonder how much time was spent working out precisely where Jeff Daniels needed to look to make it work.) And that’s somehow far more arresting than your standard wall-break. Presumably because it plays into our hope that we’d be singled out, not just part of the masses.

Over at The Believer, Geoff Dyer takes on Roland Barthes' 1980 collection Camera Lucida, a book, he claims, "bound up in [Barthes'] grief over [his mother's] death."

Barthes had long been fascinated by photographs, but his exploration of “the phenomenon of photography in its absolute novelty in world history” had its specific origin in a request from Les Cahiers du Cinéma to write something about film. The idea did not appeal. As he told friends, “I’ve got nothing to say about film, but photography on the other hand….” Having agreed to write a short piece for Les Cahiers, Barthes’s reflections on photography (photography “against film”) grew into a book...

In A.O. Scott's Telluride report for the Times, he cites Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast as an example of how the "drama of human beings confronting the elemental power of nature figures" in that director's work. Which got me yearning for more Martha Plimpton onscreen [always] but also remembering just how divisive the critical response was when the adaptation [by Paul Schrader!] of Paul Theroux's book was released in 1986. Perhaps on the eve of its 25th anniversary it's time for a reappraisal, especially given how nicely it would nestle into more recent formulations like the Global South?

Finally, Jonathan Rosenbaum recently posted his Reader review of Pump Up the Volume, which he rated a masterpiece. It's an insightful, hilarious read. The lede:

It’s hard to talk seriously about the 60s today, because TV and a lot of assholes have almost ruined it. When I taught film courses in southern California in the mid-80s, I was appalled to discover that college students thought of the 60s as a traumatic, troubled period — a time characterized by young people losing their way, freaking out on bad acid trips, denouncing their parents, getting killed in Vietnam, and protesting the way American society was being run and abjectly failing at it. For students of the 80s, the golden age was the repressive, bland, stultifying 50s, when staunch family and property values were both firmly in place — the mythical past that Uncle Ronnie and all his furry friends comfortingly evoked.

Then there's the nut graf:

From the moment Christian Slater’s precredits, offscreen monologue is heard, over a sustained guitar chord while a slow pan sweeps across an aerial night view of a suburban tract-house subdivision, Pump Up the Volume promises to be something special, and it’s a promise that’s kept. Conceivably the first genuinely radical youth movie since Over the Edge (1979), it differs from that worthy predecessor by being exhilarating rather than disturbing — it’s an upper, not a downer, and a good deal closer to farce than to tragedy (although it has room enough for both). Without wanting to go overboard, I can testify that it has given me more pleasure than any other new movie I’ve seen this summer — providing the kind of energizing, sexy elation I used to go to American movies in the hopes of finding.

Well. Eat me beat me, as the young people say. And, yes, I know that Pump Up the Volume was released in 1990, but I am taking a "long eighteenth century" approach to the notion of the Eighties, thankyouverymuch.

[Now, this, this is the Nineties.]